In a later press conference, Putin confirmed the discussion and said that “life expectancy in the near future will increase considerably” and “we also have to think about this” in terms of political and economic consequences. (In Russia, life expectancy has actually decreased considerably in recent years and the total population is falling.)
The short fragments of the conversation suggest that immortality is in the heads of the strong men of the world, although it is interesting to see how it takes on a different form than in Silicon Valley, where robots and software are more often seen as the key to lifetime instead of, say, repeating organ transplants in an aged pocket of the skin.
Shows like Upload And Alien: earth Current visions of a world where consciousness can be scanned by machines and perhaps even in other machines is loaded. In the meantime, Putin and XI think more about repeated organ transplants and life extension instead of 'the singularity'.
So, which dystopian future are we more likely to get? (Yes, I suppose, based on the current state of the world, that the near future will be quite dystopian. I think it is a good gamble.) Clones are being raised for organ transplants, as in the novel of Kazuo Ishiguro Never let me go? Or a kind of “Download your consciousness in this machine” situation in which the spirit of Elon Musk inhabits one of his beloved Tesla robots for all eternity? Given one of the two alternative, I am not entirely sure if I would want to To live forever.
